April 2015

At the start of the New Year one of our writers gave us his “what to look out for in 2015” list. So far he is on the money. One of his points was, “keep an eye on e-commerce in South Africa.” With the very recent announcement of the Kalahari.com and Takealot.com merge it has simply proven that it was an absolute gem of a prediction. It simply proves that the rest of the world is still very interested in the digital offerings of South Africa. Don’t misunderstand us, Kalahari was always going to succeed what with Naspers being its main backer but, they mustRead More →

We have all heard how terribly embarrassing it can be to experience the mob justice effect of a Twitter frenzy should a tweet (that was meant to be a direct message go public by “mistake”) or, how damaging a personal post on Facebook can be when someone shares their private point of view on a certain topic only to have the post shared over and over again by friends, journalists and critics. A perfect example of this is the #HasJustineLandedYet debacle of December 2013, when Justine Sacco (the then Director of Corporate Communications for IAC) tweeted the infamous tweet “Going to Africa. Hope IRead More →

Social media marketing and inbound marketing have been getting a lot of “hate mail” recently. Many of the “haters” have unfortunately mistaken pop-ups and cookies for inbound marketing. You know, the advertisements that pop up when you’re browsing the web. Inbound marketing is always (or should be) unobtrusive. It is not forceful in any way and should always be easy to “opt-out” from. With those key facts in mind, you quickly realise that it isn’t in fact really “marketing” as most people know it because it’s not getting shoved down your throat. It’s a choice and hence it is mutual engagement or communication. Much likeRead More →

At a recent conference held in Johannesburg, a stern warning was issued by one of the panel’s speakers that in effect South Africans should promote and support local e-commerce business’s. That, if we do not do this our economy will continue to struggle in future. This was said to be as a result of customers (who are already buying online) will continue to buy products and services on foreign owned websites. What are the implications The implications of this is that the unemployment rate will suffer further as there is no stimulation into local business and therefore less chances of job creation. Also, fewer transactions takingRead More →

Our team was having a conversation about brand awareness this week. What makes a good brand? What instils a desire or need for that brand? How much are people willing to spend on a brand? These are all relevant questions in their own right however we agreed on an answer statement of SO WHAT… It seems like a pretty harsh statement and we guess, to a certain extent it is but let us explain. This is the response of a large amount of businesses at present. Consider what any given brand would be like if they had no marketing. No radio or television adverts, noRead More →